Inventory Puzzle Gameplay

I don’t tend to pay attention to my players’ encumbrance. It’s too much work and the only time I seem to really care is if a single object they want to carry weighs like, three hundred pounds or more. I just started a character in Skyrim the other day, and noticed to my dismay the Alchemy system changed from Oblivion.

In Oblivion, you could mash ingredients together from your inventory to make potions and level up your Alchemy skill. I liked it. Not only could you indulge your kleptomania by picking up literally everything in the game world, but the resulting potions often weighed less than their component parts, and could be sold.

Not only does Skyrim take away your portable chemistry set, but the recipes are unknown to you and the entire process takes far longer. I haven’t confirmed yet, but it also looks like the potions also weigh more than the ingredients, but it also looked like botching a recipe yields neither experience nor a potion.

Fail, fail, fail, fail. Even if the latter two points turn out to be incorrect — the first two are enough to ruin the Alchemy system for the entire game.

If I can’t get those items out of my inventory fast enough, I won’t pick them up. If I don’t pick up random crap in Skyrim, I won’t even bother to look at it. If I don’t look at the random stuff, it serves literally no purpose in the game.

The Elder Scrolls scavenger hunt is part of the reason to play the game — but once that element is gone, you’re just looking for the “good stuff” — gold, skill tomes, and magic items — and all that clutter doesn’t mean a thing anymore.

I mentioned my distress to cookiemonger, and we got on the topic of carry limits and inventory puzzles. That got me thinking about inventory puzzles in general.

Really, not only do I not mind inventory puzzles, I rather enjoy weighing the utility of various pieces of loot and trying to determine whether they’re worth keeping or not. It adds something to the game — I’m not sure what, exactly.

CM however, hates inventory puzzles. More specifically, she hates limitations on carrying items that can be picked up — her reasons are complex, and it’s hard to do them justice. If she’s so inclined, she might share them on her own blog.

The question of the moment is, “when are inventory puzzles actually fun?”

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Discussion (6) ¬

Elder Scrolls is my PC/Console gaming amore. Really, i think Oblivion is the only one that has the instant potions. Morrowind’s potion system is broken in its own wonderful beautiful way; potions’ efficacy is based on your intelligence score, so you can buff your intelligence with intelligence potions to make better intelligence potions to buff your intelligence more to make even better intelligence potions until you feel like making other potions and giving yourself 600+ points of feather for 9999 seconds or whatever non-sense you feel like doing.

Also, unlike Oblivion, Morrowind didn’t have (many) 0 value “junk” items. Everything had at least SOME value. I think the explanation was something to the effect of the Imperial Septim being worth about 6 and a half Dark Elven Drakes, but it was cool that it was actually worth your while as a level 1 character to steal every tin cup, cracked clay plate and handkerchief in some schlub’s house. It does make for somewhat more tedious play for less ocd people, however, because it actually IS worth it to look in every single crate and sack, because the average “junk” container tends to have 10-100 times the cash value of a “junk” container in Oblivion.

One of the weird things I found myself doing in Oblivion with heavy junk items like skeletons was creating what I called “ballast”; I know it didn’t make any real practical sense, but by carrying heavy 0 value items, it was like finding a $20 bill in an old jacket pocket every time I realized that I DID have room in my inventory for that new cool item I found, I just had to put down a few of the random pelvises I’d been hauling around.

I tried to find a copy of Morrowind back in the day when the Internet would tell you about all the great games you missed but didn’t provide a reliable means of acquiring them — so the first Elder Scrolls game I played was Oblivion.

But like Skyrim, I didn’t actually pick it up until well after the hype died down and all the most important patches had been released, lol.

I get that instant potions might not be a fantastic idea, but maybe a portable kit that allowed you to make potions up to X level would be functional, whereas an immovable lab would be preferable (no level cap? I don’t know).

Also… as much as I like the ease with which one can craft items — the magic system in Elder Scrolls just plain sucks (in Oblivion and Skyrim anyway). The spells are super-generic and are mostly “boring elemental damage,” “niche exploration power,” or “generic pharmaceutical,” and applying them to items is underwhelming to the Nth degree.

I was the same, starting with Oblivion. I’ll admit that the magic system has its problems. Spells were a bit more varied in Morrowind, but weren’t as well integrated into the combat system (either you were in fighting stance or casting stance). For what it’s worth, though, most video game RPGs magic systems are highly limited and Elder Scrolls offers more flexibility and utility than most.

If anything, magic in ES is a toy to be played with and broken. It’s fun to figure out how to break it. Once it’s broken, it’s not as much fun, so you look for a new part of it to break. For instance, in the Oblivion game I’m playing now, I’ve kept Mr. Pants, a swashbuckling catman, at level 5 for some time. He’s got Journeyman-Expert levels in most of his skills. His go-to spell is summoning a Clanfear which, at his tiered world level, makes short work of damn near anything. Fun for awhile, but it gets old. Similarly, it seems pretty awesome at first when you figure out that you can add paralysis for 1 second to any damage spell, but gets tiresome when nothing stands a chance against you.

I can’t really vouch for the Magic in Arena or Daggerfall, though, since I’ve only run combat oriented characters.

As you mentioned above, the games lend themselves to a “break this mechanic” mentality. Unfortunately, this extends to “the basic exploration of the world” and I got bored with Oblivion as soon as I realized that no matter where I went or what I did, nothing really mattered as much as the central plot or the little “plot pockets” that exist around each one of the major guilds or side quests.

Out of all the game offered, the only thing I really cared about was the Mage’s Guild and that one necromancer plot (Memnarch? I forget), which I “accidentally” completed at such a low level that it was trifling in difficulty and ridiculously unfulfilling.

Interestingly, the more “low tech” I go, the more fulfilling the standard game seems to be — playing a “dumb fighter” character isn’t what I want to do, but time and again proves to be one of the more satisfying experiences the game offers.

I haven’t broken Skyrim’s “exploration” yet, except in a few places where I’m stuck save-scumming against enemies apparently too high-level for what I’m supposed to be able to take. It’s taught me how to abuse the “sneaking sniper dance.”

So far I’m enjoying the Mage College subplot, and I’m alternating between long cross-country treks and completing Mage quests. I already have ideas for my next character, which will be a “dumb fighter” focusing on heavy armor/blocking/blah blah blah.